Run This Sh*t: How to Eat Like a Grownup

At this point it’s not news that food is just as susceptible to conservative swings as politics and religion—in tough times, people want to get back to the things they’re comfortable with. The double whammies of 9/11 and a prolonged recession sent the ’90s-era wave of precious haute cuisine grinding to a halt.

We’re thrilled people stopped treating food like it was sacred—nothing makes us happier than a chef at the top of the game putting as much thought into a Rice Krispies treat bakery, casual and fun got edged out by straight-up childish.

We’re firm believers that there’s room for all kinds of dining, as high- and low-brow as you can get. Bring on the queso-smothered tater tot and the 20-course tasting menus, the trompe l’oeuil vegetable plates and the ramen burgers. What we can’t get behind is people who’ve taken this casual shift as permission to act like babies about food. Sure, when your mom made you dinner as a kid, you got to be as weird about it as you wanted, putting ketchup on everything or only eating with a spoon. But when a chef puts time and effort into creating a dish—and even a fancy hamburger has had time and effort put into it—it’s only right to give it the respect it deserves.

As the pendulum swings back and new restaurants start taking creative risks again, it’s time to swing ourselves back with it. After all, there’s no quicker way to turn off a date than questionable table behavior. The solution? Bring back some classic moves that have been neglected for decades, and drop the childish act once and for all.

Get started on our 10-step program for eating and drinking like an adult (even if you are still just pretending to actually be one).

Don't Be Cute

When an expression comes from a Sesame Street character, it should be your first cue to steer clear. And yet somehow Cookie Monster’s binge-eating rebel yell—om nom nom nom nom—has made it through into prime time, bringing with it an avalanche of cutesified toddler-speak. Part of a well-meaning but ultimately disastrous attempt to make a historically pretentious industry approachable, food baby talk began to catch on around the same time bacon became an obsession, rather than a breakfast food. When Rachael Ray showed up 10 years ago with her Yum-Os and her EVOO, her “just a regular gal” persona was held up for laughs by self-serious food types. Now, every Yelper wants to tell you about her favorite "sammie," and even government agencies are tagging #noms. Foodspotting launched in 2009 with the “Nom” as the honor awarded to appealing photos of food. But even they have wised up, and the nonsense talk has since been replaced by the more prosaic “Love.”
Saying no to baby talk isn’t just about being a grownup – as former New York Times critic and queen of the dignified food writers Ruth Reichl recently said, the stunted vocabulary is “disrespectful to food.”Where to start: We can't even tell you to follow a dictionary on this, because those traitors added nom nom in 2011 (trendhumpers!). Just use your head: If a word seems like it would be used by someone wearing pigtails—toddler or adult—just stay away.

Have Some Perspective

You did not "destroy" those nachos. Or "crush" them. You ate them. It’s great that you enjoyed your food, bro, but if baby talk is one way of making food feel approachable, frat-ification is its flipside. Dudes who were once made uncomfortable by a disdainful maître d who judged their cargo shorts have now figured out how to throw on an oxford shirt and work their way into some nice rooms. But rather than bow down and play the game, they need to prove they’re doing it their way. Inappropriately aggressive food verbs tell the world, “Yeah, I paid $20 for a kale salad, but then I went and got blitzed on Natty Light because I still know how to keep it real.”
Meanwhile, the only epic mealtime in history is the one Beowulf had before heading out to slay some beasts. There's nothing heroic about an obscene amount of food, or an unholy stoner combination involving Doritos, Cronuts, and regret. Nobody's impressed that you eat like a pig.
Where to start: We know you’re excited, and that’s awesome. But there’s a whole world of perfectly useful food language already out there for you to use. It’s cool to just say you liked something; that it was delicious or awesome or that you inhaled it faster than Scarface on a bender. And we’re still cool with going H.A.M.—we’re not totally dead inside.

Stop Saying You Don’t Like Mushrooms

Or Brussels sprouts, or blue cheese, just because your nana made it for you one time when you were 10 and it was gross but she made you stay at the table until you ate it all. If you haven't eaten something as an adult, you just can't say you don't like it. Kids also hate bathing and wearing pants, but you can't get away with skipping those after puberty hits, either. More often than not, aversions to food lie in traumatic memories surrounding the meal rather than physical response to the taste.
Besides, no offense to your nana, but it’s a safe bet that most restaurants are going to prepare a better version of whatever it is you hate than she did. Then there’s the fact that there are thousands of ways to cook something—a raw button mushroom is a completely different experience from a roasted hen-of-the-woods, or a braised shiitake—you can’t possibly hate all of the versions, all of the time. Unless it’s cilantro; you guys get a genetic pass.
Where to start: Go to a restaurant where you respect the chef’s abilities and judgment. Order a dish that has the dreaded food as one of a number of components, and don’t try to pick it apart the minute it arrives to spot the offending ingredient. Make sure your bite includes a little bit of everything, and go from there. Still don’t like it? Try a different preparation—after three tries, we’ll give this one to you.

Have an After-Dinner Drink

Classic cocktails are old news; amari, like Fernet and Campari, have been rescued from the clutches of old Italian men and their bitter punch is the only thing most bartenders get it up for anymore. The final frontier of boozing is the after-dinner drink—still associated more with grandpas than arm-gartered bartenders, it’s a grownup tradition we want to bring back. Some people are already with us: At Eleven Madison Park, dinner ends with a bottle of apple brandy left invitingly on the table, and restaurants like the Breslin and Dovetail are building up their sherry lists out of love for the misunderstood booze.
We rep hard for the stodginess and tradition of the after-dinner drink—a reluctance to be swayed by trends is immensely mature. And you just know they’re going to be picked up eventually (the Butterfly is already serving a classed-up version of the brandy old-fashioned, a deeply uncool Wisconsin cocktail dragged kicking and screaming into New York City), at which point you can shake your head and talk about the good old days.
Where to start: You’ve got three basic options. Brandy and cognac are wine that’s been distilled to bring its alcohol level up and aged—this is the classic choice of serious ballers (Henny, anyone?). Sherry and port are both wines that have been fortified with added brandy and then aged, graded by lightness and sugar levels—a good starting point is an oloroso, which is on the sweeter end but not overpowering. Then there are brandies made with fruit other than grapes, also called eaux-de-vie; these include slivovitz and schnapps. You probably can’t pull these off, unless you’re 75 years old or currently smoking a pipe—they’ve got a "drinking out of mom's liquor cabinet" taint that takes some next-level grownup-ness to overcome. Baby steps.

Eat Food the Way It’s Meant to Be Eaten

We know, we got the same lecture about eating with your hands that you did. But that was when you were 7, and all you really wanted was to see what mashed potatoes felt like. Now that you're grown, the dirty secret is that sometimes proper table manners means eating with your hands. There are, of course, numerous cuisines that are traditionally eaten with your hands—Ethiopian, Indian, the traditional Kamayan of the Philippines. Maybe you've even picked up your nigiri at a sushi restaurant with your fingers and felt like a big shot while giving your date a lecture about how they do it in Japan.
But we want to take it back to a basic level: Don't eat pizza, tacos, or (this happens, we've seen it) sandwiches with a knife and fork. These are all foods that were engineered to be eaten by hand; who are you to tell the Earl of Sandwich he got it wrong? Knife and forkers are mortified by the very idea of getting messy for a split second, or they think people are all going to laugh when they get lettuce on their face. You know who eats pizza with a knife and fork? Donald Trump. We rest our case.
Where to start: Eating with your hands is about two things: taming your inner Sasquatch, and getting comfortable with the potential for embarrassment. Don't go shoving things into your face indiscriminately; take moderate bites, and pay attention to things like pizza topping slide. And understand that nobody is going to judge you if you end up with a little sauce on your chin, really. They're just as busy trying to keep the sauce off theirs.

Small Plates: Get on the Bus

Sharing: It’s the first thing every kid gets taught, just as soon as they hit preschool and have to learn that they can’t have all of the Legos all of the time. But when it comes to dining out, there are still grabby Gusses out there who can’t get over the idea that they don’t get to have their own plate. Were you raised during the Depression? There’s no other excuse for being so dramatically greedy about something that is, ultimately, a directly renewable resource (didn’t get enough of the prawns? Order another one).
While small plates get knocked for being sneakily expensive, there are plenty of legit reasons for restaurants to eschew the old Appetizer-Entrée-Dessert hustle: Chefs get to flex their creativity, presenting flavor combinations that wouldn’t work in the large-scale. Luxury ingredients become a lot more affordable when you’re using a quarter the amount you would for a full-sized plate. And you get to try more of the menu, getting a better sense of what the restaurant can do, rather than face the heartbreak of ordering wrong and being saddled with a miserable pasta while your dining partner gets blown away by the steak. Sure, getting an odd number of items for the table can be a pain, but if you really can’t work out an equitable deal with your tablemates, you’ve learned a valuable lesson about each other.
Where to start: If you really can’t handle it, at least keep it to yourself. Go to the small-plates place (e.g., most new restaurants) and get three dishes just for you. Just don’t be surprised when your friends don’t invite you out again after you refuse to share with them.

Get Comfortable with Medium-Rare Pork

Do you know the last time someone got trichinosis from undercooked pork? No, neither do we. The last reported outbreak of the disease, caused by undercooking meat infected with the parasite Trichinella (which is spread by the animal consuming garbage or infected rodents), came from black bear meat, not pigs. Since the 1940s, advances in basic food safety have dropped the number of cases of the disease from the hundreds down to a handful a year, primarily among roadkill scavengers and unorthodox hunters like the aforementioned Grizzly Man. Any pig raised in a marginally clean environment has almost zero chance of being infected with the parasite—and besides, the bug is killed at 137 degrees, a temp so rare only Hannibal Lecter would go for it.
Even the USDA is on board, recently lowering its recommended cooking temperature to 145 degrees, right around the medium-rare mark—and those guys think leftover pizza is only good for three days. After having had a properly prepared, thick-cut pork chop, those paper-dry slabs your mom used to serve on Sundays are about as appealing as hologram ODB at Rock the Bells; heritage breeds like Mangalitsa shine when their rounder, more complex flavor isn’t beaten out of them by unforgiving temperatures.
Where to start: It’s rare we get to say this, but trust the government on this one. Big Brother really does know what’s best for you. Of course, eating better pork will make this experiment go more smoothly.

No Food Challenges

Unless you're Joey Chestnut, eating is never a race or an endurance test. It doesn’t matter how much your friends goad you on, the thrill of watching someone house an eight-patty hamburger or the world’s spiciest chili fades quickly once you realize that what goes up must come down. Or out. Nobody wants to be around you while you try to digest that monstrosity.
Restaurants that make their name on a gimmick generally know they’re not serving food that would make them remarkable by any other standards (we’re looking at you, phaal challenge)—why waste time eating any of it, let alone an inhumane amount. And the benefits for you are slim to none. Your sweaty photo on the wall, maybe a photocopied certificate? It’s about time your self-worth came from a better source than the mild revulsion and awe of others.
Where to start: If you need to punish yourself with food to really feel alive, don’t make others suffer with you. Hit a legit Sichuan restaurant and tell them you want the full ma la treatment, or an Isaan Thai spot, and go to town with jungle curry and laap. Your companions can marvel at your questionable talents, or just have a decent meal.

Bring Back the Cheese Course

There are a lot of things we're happy to have got rid of from classical European fine dining: the 18 different forks, finger bowls, boy-girl seating. But somewhere along the line, the cheese course got folded into dessert or cut altogether, and we can't let that stand. Any food prepared tableside is awesome—Carbone's caesar salad is already the stuff of legend—and being able to scope out the goods before you order it means you're more likely to get the things you want. If you can't handle both cheese and dessert (since the other thing that went out the window with Escoffier was fashionable obesity), we'll go cheese every time. Cheesecraft is an underappreciated art, and unlike a melty dessert, a cheese course lets you finish dinner at a leisurely, relaxed pace.
Where to start: We won't front: A full-scale cheese cart can be daunting. Thankfully, most restaurants these days go for a composed plate—it's easier on servers and supply chains, and the kitchen can match accompaniments like honey or jams to specific cheeses. If you're flying old-school, a good rule of thumb is to include one soft, one hard, and one blue cheese (or other strong cheese if you don't do blue), as well as a variety of milks (cows, goat, sheep).

Eat Off Cuts

If you eat animals, you need to be able to deal with the fact that you’re eating animals, and accept the inherent responsibility there. Not to get all One World on you, but refusing to eat 95% of an animal because it’s a little grisly is beyond wasteful—it’s just immature. If offal is too grody for you, if the thought of stomach lining or tongue makes you squeamish, think long and hard about whether you can handle being a carnivore at all. As British meat master Hugh-Fearnley Whittingstall has written, “What should make you feel queasy is the preponderance of lean steaks and skinless, boneless chicken flesh in the meat aisles of most supermarkets–both representing only part of the whole animal. Where's the rest of it?”
Hand-in-hand with growing movements toward eating less meat overall, like Meatless Mondays and Mark Bittman’s Vegan Before 6, is the nose-to-tail philosophy. And guess what? This ethos is not really a hard sell, because this stuff is tasty. There’s a reason cultures that began eating offal hundreds of years ago out of necessity don't stop once they gain access to more standard ingredients.
Where to start: For your average steak-eater, offal's radically different textures can be daunting. Try a braised dish that incorporates pig’s feet—the collagen-rich cut melts into the sauce, adding body without too many odd bits. Or go for heart—the hardworking muscle comes close to flank steak in both texture and flavor. Oh, and check out our beginner's guide to offal.

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